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Transfigured by—consequentialism?

August the 6th is a spiritually important date in two ways. In the Catholic Church, it is the Feast of the Transfiguration (cf. Matthew 17: 1-8), which I celebrated by attending Mass this morning. The Transfiguration was a sign of who Jesus really is and what those who love him are destined, in our own smaller ways, to become; in Eastern Christianity, some people are alleged to have exhibited and/or seen the Uncreated Light that Peter, James, and John saw on Mount Tabor; in the West, some living folks who have undergone "near-death" experiences are certain they have seen it too. In American history, today is the 54th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. That day manifested, concretely, the then-new fact that humanity had developed the capacity to destroy itself by its own artifice. The spiritual stakes of history had been raised; the question is whether the gamble, now unavoidable, will turn out disastrously before the Second Coming. That question is spiritual because it turns, in large part, on that of what sort of morality will prevail.

As a point of departure for framing the moral issue, an article in today's Wall Street Journal does rather nicely. The author, military historian Walter Kozak, notes that most Americans toward the end of World War II favored dropping The Bomb as a means of saving (mostly American) lives; whereas, as time goes by, fewer and fewer Americans find the act justifiable. So as to forestall much pointless wrangling, I shall concede that, in the circumstances, dropping The Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved many more lives than the several hundred thousand civilian casualties in the vicinity of the explosions. Given our war aim of "unconditional surrender," the practical necessity of invading the Japanese home islands as a means of achieving that aim, and the fanatical dedication of the Japanese people to their Emperor, no other calculation was or is credible. But the question remains: was the act morally permissible all the same? The affirmative answer may have been obvious to most Americans, especially combat-weary veterans, at the time. But that doesn't make it so; nor do many thoughtful Americans think it does.

Consequentialists, of course, for whom utilitarian-style calculation just is the model for any and all moral judgment, almost invariably believe Hiroshima was justifiable. For as I've implied, the relevant utility calculation could hardly be more obvious. But the Catholic Church, along with most other major Christian churches, answers in the negative. Thus Vatican II:

Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.

Such an apodictic statement was made in the context of a moral tradition that is the very antithesis of consequentialism. And it is by no means idiosyncratic. But who is right?

The term 'consequentialist', now a well-known term of art in moral philosophy, was coined decades ago by the Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe for the purpose of dispelling the misimpression that utilitarianism is limited to moral philosophers called utilitarians. In modern times, it has in fact become the default moral philosophy of the common man in the West. That's worth noting in this context because, in a well-known post-war pamphlet entitled "Mr. Truman's Degree" (republished online by a libertarian consequentialist criticizing it) Anscombe argued that dropping The Bomb on Hiroshima (as well as the earlier firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden) was immoral. Admitting that the utility calculation in the Japanese case was obvious, she concluded, in effect, "so much the worse for unconditional surrender as a war aim." I believe she was right. If unconditional surrender had not been our aim, and if we had instead made certain assurances to the Japanese people about the Emperor and other matters, then many innocent lives could have been spared by demonstrating The Bomb in open country, establishing a naval blockade, grabbing bits of mainland territory by piecemeal invasion, and negotiating a surrender. The way the Pacific war was actually ended only served to demonstrate a tragic fact in many lives since time immemorial: once people adopt a broadly wrongful course of action, they often maneuver themselves into a position that can only be escaped by committing a still-greater wrong.

That consequentialism has become the default moral philosophy in the West, and in other places too, only entrenches that tragic fact on a large scale. The impending demographic suicide of the West is the result of calculating, absurdly, that maintaining our preferred lifestyles is more valuable than replacing ourselves. That is why the holocaust of abortion doesn't strike most people as the mass human sacrifice it truly is. Severing the link between sex and procreation, in the forms of contraception and artificial reproduction, is taken for granted as a needed condition for "freedom" even as it continues to undermine the family and thus eat away at the basis of civil society. Ironically, if we wish to survive and promote the sort of human flourishing that Western science and political institutions have made possible, we must cease to be consequentialists. If we remain consequentialists, we may go out with a demographic whimper, too few and spiritually exhausted to resist conquest by a religiously backward civilization. Or, even before that happens, we could end civilized life itself by accident with a bang of the sort that ended the greatest war in human history. Either way, we will go out—unless we recover a sense of "the laws of nature and of nature's God" that is increasingly forbidden open expression in our public life. What we need is a new Transfiguration.

Just finnished reading "Simony in Africa" :), Anscombe was the one who made me realise that my pre-Christian 'victory at all costs' Klingon mentality wasn't compatible with Catholocism. Unfortunately I only learnt that 2 months ago :)

Well done! The juxtaposition of the Feast with these atrocities is incredible, almost as if God is shouting.

Joshua Snyder has a compelling round-up of voices on this matter, but this one, contemporary to that time, is very sobering;

What I hoped to discover was an expression of the conviction that we the people of the United States and perhaps with us the people of Britain, have struck the most powerful blow ever delivered against Christian civilization and the moral law. I would call it a “crime” were it not that the word implies sin and sin requires consciousness of guilt. Even more deplorable than the act itself is the fact that those who prepared the bombing, those who carried it out, and the whole nation – or two nations – which welcomed the news of it, seems to have had neither doubt nor scruple about its morality. It is pathetic and tragic that people whose civilization is called Christian, presumably founded on the Gospel, had to all appearances no doubt that what was done was permissible and laudable.
Fr. James Martin Gillis, Editor of The Catholic World

The ironic thing, of course, is that most consequentialisms are simply inadequate on their own terms. If one actually took into account the full range of consequences, temporal and eternal, quantifiable and qualitative, then true conclusions would be reached by "consequentialism."

The problem with consequentialisms today are not that they rely on consequences per se, since the wages of sin really is death which is why Scripture has no qualms about warning us to avoid sin by highlighting its consequences, but that modern consequentialisms do not acknowledge the full range of consequences, do not rightly discern and order their import, and have far too much pride to recognize the limitations of their knowledge.

For Christians, there is, finally, no fundamental division between the right and the good, if only we had eyes to see. It is in this sense that I would declare Christian consequentialism to be true, though I prefer to avoid the term because it stinks of a picture of ethics as a formulaic calculus of quantitative measures at the expense of crucial qualitative judgments.

Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself.

I have heard it said that the Hiroshima area had been made a legitimate military objective by the deliberate placement (by the Japanese) of military bases there in order to forestall direct attacks on them. I don't know whether this is accurate or not.

I have also heard - purely through hearsay, so I don't present it with any authority - that we leaflet-bombed Hiroshima before we destroyed it, telling the people and the authorities we were going to bomb, get the heck out.

If both of these were true, at least a beginning of a case could be made that the destruction of the city was not, quite, "indiscriminate" in the moral sense of the Pope's words. I am not saying that the case is made yet - for one thing, a lot more would have to be said about what we actually expected the result of the leaflet bombing would be, just for starters. But if the authorities who ordered the leaflets thought they would be effective at getting people out, then it does put a different color on the act.

I too have long wondered why we didn't bomb a deserted area of Japan to prove what we could do. The possible consequences of this option can never proven, but the fact that nine days later we "had to" bomb a second city suggests that a lesser act of destruction could never have succeeded in changing the minds of the high command. (Remember, we only had 2 A-bombs at the time.) But surely there was at LEAST one or two relatively isolated military camps. Could we not have dealt with those? What about the navy - could we not have bombed a fleet 30 miles from land?

Mike, I think that one should be very cautious about developing the notion that we should not have demanded unconditional surrender. One must keep in mind that many people thought that the failure to deal with Germany this way after WW1 was part of what led to WW2, so they were keen on not repeating earlier mistakes.

Secondly, with Japan at least, there was a certain level of cultural disjoint that made conditional surrender suspect: the Japanese culture did not admit of honorable defeat short of death. Many of their soldiers would "surrender", and then turn on their captors and fight again. A conditional surrender was more than a little problematic in trying to consider how it would play out in order to further peace. It MAY have been bad statesmanship, but you would have a difficult time proving it with what they had to go on.

While I would not like to try to play the part of defense attorney for Truman and the military command on this, I would suggest that the case against them, at least as usually presented, needs a little more filling in.

Actually, Tony, I was quoting the Second Vatican Council, the largest gathering of Catholic bishops in history. Of course Pope Paul VI promulgated the document I quoted from, which means that it is the teaching of the papacy too. But in a world where the teaching of the Catholic Church is far too often assumed to be just the teaching of "Rome," as if it didn't matter that it is also the teaching of the worldwide, historic episcopate, it's important to stress the ecumenicity of the teaching.

One can debate from now until doomsday whether Truman and the brass in July 1945 really "intended" the mass killing of innocent people. As Anscombe argued, however, the presumption must be that they did, since they had several available alternatives, one of which you've mentioned. It's doubtful that the Japanese really believed our threats about The Bomb or that the American leadership really believed, as opposed to hoping, the Japanese would believe them.

That consequentialism has become the default moral philosophy in the West, and in other places too, only entrenches that tragic fact on a large scale.

One need only watch the Beeb and see entire shows capitalize on this fact.

In fact, there was a recent premiere of one of the BBC's more popular shows that demonstrated the rather repulsive notion that it would seem justifiably correct to fry a child if it will save 7 billion people on earth!

I've already explained my, and Anscombe's, view that the presumption must be that they intended it. We can't "know" it, of course, which is why God alone is their judge. But what they did is the sort of thing that is morally evil if intended and horrific even if not intended.

that we leaflet-bombed Hiroshima before we destroyed it, telling the people and the authorities we were going to bomb, get the heck out

The bomb's radius was 200 miles. The population was 350,000 at the time, so a mass exodus able to traverse that distance should have caused some qualms amongst the Planners. 70,000 died immediately from the explosion and another 70,000 died from radiation within five years.

I think that one should be very cautious about developing the notion that we should not have demanded unconditional surrender. One must keep in mind that many people thought that the failure to deal with Germany this way after WW1 was part of what led to WW2

Many think the terms imposed by the Treaty of Versailles created the conditions for Hitlerism and WWII.

the Japanese culture did not admit of honorable defeat short of death.

There were insurrections and riots in Japan over the hardships of the war with many anxious to end it. The Japanese sought terms for surrender almost a year prior and received the response that their Emperor - a demigod in that culture - would face a trial as a war criminal with a guilty verdict punishable by hanging. After destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Allies relented on this condition. Instead we settled for Hirohito announcing an unconditional surrender over the radio.

A conditional surrender was more than a little problematic in trying to consider how it would play out in order to further peace.

More morally problematic than incinerating 2 cities? There are worse things than the geopolitical problems posed by a less than complete annihilation of the enemy. No doubt some of those who have parted this world can confirm.

While I would not like to try to play the part of defense attorney for Truman and the military command on this

Wise choice. The prosecution had Truman's Chief of Staff, Admiral William D. Leahy, willing to testify;"... the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. . . . My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

I shall concede that, in the circumstances, dropping The Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved many more lives than the several hundred thousand civilian casualties in the vicinity of the explosions. Given our war aim of "unconditional surrender," the practical necessity of invading the Japanese home islands as a means of achieving that aim, and the fanatical dedication of the Japanese people to their Emperor, no other calculation was or is credible.

Good article, Michael, apart from this statement. Though it passes for conventional wisdom today, some distinguished political and military minds disagreed at the time. See:

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."

- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons."

- Admiral William D. Leahy

"...the Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945...up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; ...if such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the [atomic] bombs."

- Herbert Hoover

"When I asked General [Douglas] MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."

Thanks for the compliment and those quotations, Jeff. I incline to agree with them. But as I said, I made the concession I did so as to avoid the sort of historical wrangling that would have inevitably distracted from the moral and spiritual points I wanted to make.

One of the practical problems with consequentialism, of course, is that it's easy to get so lost in the consequences that you forget to look at the act itself -- whenever you think of it, you start substituting the consequences for the actual act. Seventy thousand or so human beings were simply obliterated from the face of the earth in a matter of seconds, men, women, and children, all just gone. Tens of thousands more died slowly through radiation sickness and cancer. And then, when the bomb fell beside Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki a few days later, forty thousand more gone in an instant, and tens of thousands more dying slowly through radiation sickness and cancer. All those hopes, all those dreams, all those works, all those people, every single one in the image of God, swept suddenly out of life, without any chance of fight or defense. I think you're right that it contrasts with the Transfiguration as death contrasts with Life.

I should say that I think we need to be careful when talking about consequentialisms, because they are not all the same; they all have problems, but don't all share every problem. It's impossible, for a number of reasons, to imagine John Stuart Mill accepting the claim that the obliteration of seventy thousand lives in an instant, and slow death for tens of thousands more, was morally permissible. Where consequentialism comes in here is that it seems that all the views on which it is possible to consider it permissible are consequence-based -- any other basis puts it clearly in the wrong. And that should make us raise the question of how often we do this in other areas of our life.

"One can debate from now until doomsday whether Truman and the brass in July 1945 really "intended" the mass killing of innocent people."

Of course they intended it. And it was tragically necessary. And those who would obstruct such tragically necessary means to defend the free West from megalomaniac fanatics like Imperial Japan -- who mass-murdered more people (Chinese and Filipinos) before WW2 even broke out than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined -- are culpable of a graver sin than those who chose to drop those bombs. But all those millions of lives killed throughout the various theaters of WW2 around the world could have been greatly minimized, if not spared, had appeasers not been blind to the fanaticism coalescing in the 1930s.

Now that we are faced with a greater danger than Nazism, Fascism and Imperial Japane -- an Islam Redivivus -- the same appeasers are here in various flavors, including a possible majority of Christians, who collude in the unconscionable, reckless and asinine whitewashing of evil, militantly supremacist Islam and of the Muslims who enable it.

Mike L. premises (after the fact) that unconditional surrender was the wrong policy. Our fire bombing of Tokyo actually killed more people than the A bombs, but that's another argument.

That was a nice quote from Vatican II, sincere and all that, so let's quote it again:

Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.

So, is this hindsight by the bishops and Pope, or forward looking?

If it applies in hindsight, then it applies to God and the Hebrews who tried to obey Him by slaughtering the Canaanites, man, woman, child, and their livestock; and were rebuked for failing to do so to the extent God demanded of them. (Not to mention various prophets calling for war and vast destruction of enemies.)

Now, I happen to be of the opinion that God has never ordered any of his children to murder other of his children. But that's my opinion, and I could be wrong.

How exactly is it a crime against God as mentioned in the quote if God is the author of a Creation which embodies competition of organisms that leads to conscious humans who develop cultures that then compete against each other to the point of annihilation of some or many?

It's a winnowing of ideas, beliefs, moralities with many stops, starts, experiments, failures, cruelties, and some improvements. There is a procession from primitive or proto humans to modern Man, as there is in the development of religion and culture. Christians have to believe the second, at least, since Christ's appearance is considered Providential at that time and not coincidental or accidental.

The Church, of course, believes in the development of theology, or rather, more being understood of God's revelation over time.

Isn't it rather sentimental and naive of the bishops to keep insisting that we should all just get along when war has been built into life and Mankind as a mechanism of building better minds and cultures?

(An aside: Or are Christians saying human brains and minds cannot develop any more, and may not improve through any form of natural selection [or Intelligent design?] Are we stuck with this brain until the Second Coming? have we reached the limit of brain development? And how would we know that?)

Or would we prefer to think of war as the external manifestation of interior conflict? That people cannot find peace within, and thus make war without.

In fact, many people are much happier when they are in crisis than stasis.

For myself, though, whatever emotional discontent I may have at this stage of my life is easily alleviated through prayer, but I find myself ready to kill other human beings if need be as a duty to others and myself.

In any event, human life is proceeding exactly as God intended. Somehow we're supposed to forgive God for death, disease, and natural disasters, but not ourselves for war? Or are we still blaming ourselves for death, too, because of Adam and Eve?

"When I asked General [Douglas] MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."

--- I hope it is not too churlish to note that Gen MacArthur was later sacked by the arch-Mason and all-round villian Harry Truman for trying his best to extend the Korean War into China.

For some years now every 6th August, Truman's reputation is regularly trashed by Catholics who either had no role in the war or whose forebears dutifully followed his marching orders. Unlike the Inquisition no advocacy is to be allowed him. I will not be surprised that in a few years time, he will be seen as a Guy Fawkes figure to be taken out in effigy and lit in a bonfire to warm up discussions on consequentialism.

Ivan, it's not his general marching orders that are in question; and because of that it's fairly common for Catholics simply to say that it was morally wrong to evaporate tens of thousands of civilians in an instant, and not pursue the question of how one should evaluate Truman himself in that light. And whether one justifies it or not, it is absurd to ignore the gravity of an act like that. But admittedly Catholics do have something of a stake in these things which colors their view; among the many others that it killed, the bomb at Nagasaki destroyed in a brief time two-thirds of Japan's largest Catholic population, being dropped literally right on top of them. Catholics have been struggling to deal with that since the bomb was dropped.

On the other hand, one of the oddest things about Christian mysticism is the process of discovering the impassivity (and approval) of God in the face of human (and animal) suffering and the personal sympathy He has for each individual and creature.

And if we are to emulate God, we have a similar situation to consider. On the one hand, everyone's going to die and has an eternal life, so all's well that ends well; and on the other, what a terrible thing to be an agent of death or someone impassive about the death and suffering of others.

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us where we are. With a will to do good where we can in a limited way, while accepting that injustice, cruelty, atrocity, and evil co-exist at the same time as co-operation, kindness, tenderness, affection, and decency.

At this very moment, somewhere in the world, women are being beaten, children are being raped, men are being exploited and abused, or are exploiting and abusing.

Kevin, that's just nonsense. Radiation. People exposure within 500 meters of ground zero was fatal. People exposed at distances of 3 to 5 kilometers later showed symptoms of aftereffects, including radiation-induced cancers. Even today's vastly more powerful bombs don't have a radius of 200 miles. If that had been true, then everyone who had anything to do with Alamogordo would have been dead.

There were insurrections and riots in Japan over the hardships of the war with many anxious to end it. The Japanese sought terms for surrender almost a year prior and received the response that their Emperor - a demigod in that culture - would face a trial as a war criminal with a guilty verdict punishable by hanging. After destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Allies relented on this condition. Instead we settled for Hirohito announcing an unconditional surrender over the radio.

Yes, well, you make the case well that it was difficult to project the outcome either with a conditional surrender, or an unconditional one. What does that prove, other than that reasonable men could disagree on which was the better course?

A conditional surrender was more than a little problematic in trying to consider how it would play out in order to further peace.

More morally problematic than incinerating 2 cities? There are worse things than the geopolitical problems posed by a less than complete annihilation of the enemy.

No, of course not. And that's not what I was saying. The consideration was whether we should have sought unconditional surrender. We will never know if a negotiated conditional surrender in Feb 1945 would have resulted in mass insurrections against any occupying forces, or a resurgence of a militaristic Japan in 1955. But that possibility was what they were trying to deal with. The fact that they may have made a mistake is not evidence that they were evil in their estimation that unconditional surrender was the best choice for long-term peace.

Given the quotes supplied by Jeff, I accept that there is no satisfactory basis for claiming that we had a valid military objective to bombing Hiroshima. Which certainly suggests that Truman & commanders did not really care whether the leafleting worked. Which would mean that it does fall under the condemnation Mike quoted from VII. I would no longer push that issue.

Given the quotes supplied by Jeff, I accept that there is no satisfactory basis for claiming that we had a valid military objective to bombing Hiroshima. Which certainly suggests that Truman & commanders did not really care whether the leafleting worked. Which would mean that it does fall under the condemnation Mike quoted from VII. I would no longer push that issue.

Those quotes are widely available to anyone who has undertaken even a superficial reading of the matter, but it is good to get them on record because the consequentialist likes to hide in the weeds of false narratives, official histories and distorted facts. However, are you now saying there was a case to drop the bomb had the leafletting worked, the Japanese were united in "fighting to the death", and a conditional surrender would present problems to our interests, including armed resistance to our occupation ro encirclement? Or, that there is some kind of moral math that says minimizing casualties to our military is a justifiable cause for bombing innocent civilians?

For what is worth, and this probably piling on, I believe Robert Nisbet's case that Truman was anxious to use the bomb to make a statement to the wider world, in particular the Soviet Union, is true.

"Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation."...If [that] applies in hindsight, then it applies to God and the Hebrews who tried to obey Him by slaughtering the Canaanites, man, woman, child, and their livestock; and were rebuked for failing to do so to the extent God demanded of them.

The consequent of that conditional statement does not follow from the antecedent. The Catholic Church's natural-law prohibition on the direct, intentional killing of innocent human beings is understood to apply to man acting on his own initiative; the Fifth Commandment makes that clear, yet is compatible with God's ordering, e.g., Joshua and Saul to commit genocide. That's because God, unlike us, is free to override the norms of the natural moral law on occasion and to require us to do so, just as he is free to override the natural scientific law on occasion by doing miracles. However, I agree that, at this state of human and theological development, there is no reason to believe that God would any longer order anybody to contravene the Fifth Commandment. The fullness of divine revelation in and through Christ makes such a possibility otiose.

How exactly is it a crime against God as mentioned in the quote if God is the author of a Creation which embodies competition of organisms that leads to conscious humans who develop cultures that then compete against each other to the point of annihilation of some or many?

In any event, human life is proceeding exactly as God intended. Somehow we're supposed to forgive God for death, disease, and natural disasters, but not ourselves for war? Or are we still blaming ourselves for death, too, because of Adam and Eve?

There are so many problems with this that I hardly know where to begin.

If "human life is proceeding exactly as God intended," does that mean that God intends that we commit moral evil, or only permits us to commit it? If the former, then you do not believe in the God proclaimed by the Church; if the latter, then how can you say that God intended it?

The notion that we are "supposed to forgive God" for physical evil presupposes that his ordering creation as he has is a moral fault calling for forgiveness. What makes you think that? It's not the teaching of the Church.

We can blame Adam and Eve for death, but not ourselves; for we only inherit original sin, of which death is the most obvious effect, as a state rather than an action. See CCC §404-405. Are you going to "blame" God for that too?

Those quotes are widely available to anyone who has undertaken even a superficial reading of the matter,

Good golly, I admit that proposed data - which I submitted only tentatively because I was unsure of their soundness - was unfounded, and now you want to say that I shouldn't have even submitted it, that I failed to do even a "superficial reading of the matter." Well, I had done more than most, and less than some. I've read Winnie Churchill's 6-volume account of the war, for example. Is that superficial?

However, are you now saying there was a case to drop the bomb had the leafletting worked,

I was saying that had the leafleting worked (had the city been emptied and the people safe), there is a legitimate case that dropping the bomb would not be that "indiscriminate destruction" which is justly decried. Do you feel that this is in error?

... the Japanese were united in "fighting to the death", and a conditional surrender would present problems to our interests, including armed resistance to our occupation ro encirclement?

Sorry, that does not pertain. I was separating out the issue of whether we should or should not have aimed for unconditional surrender from the choice to use the A-bomb. Even if we were correct in moral certainty that unconditional surrender was the only viable peace option, that would not have justified the bombing of 80,000 civilians. So the issues are separable. What I was doing was taking to task the assumption on Mike's part that the consideration of "other options" from using the bomb should have included accepting conditional surrender, as if that option had not been on the table and was deemed equally fruitful towards final peace. Maybe, but you can't assume it.

Or, that there is some kind of moral math that says minimizing casualties to our military is a justifiable cause for bombing innocent civilians?

No, you have the wrong opponent, I never thought or suggested that. I have firmly fixed in mind that all methods of pursuing war are supposed to be aimed at a just peace thereafter, and are supposed to use the least destructive means for all parties involved to achieve that, even if it means somewhat more casualties on our side. You're barking up the wrong tree.

Mike, I agree with almost all of your reply to Mark, except possibly this piece:

That's because God, unlike us, is free to override the norms of the natural moral law on occasion and to require us to do so, just as he is free to override the natural scientific law on occasion by doing miracles.

I would view that theory with concern, since we usually think of moral principles being grounded somewhat more firmly into God's nature and Divine goodness, which He cannot contradict.

Another option for justifying the Israelite genocide of Canaanites is this: while no human has the right to take another's innocent life at his own choice, God DOES that have right. All of our lives belong to God, and are granted to us only so long as God chooses to continue to will our existence. As soon as He ceases to will that, we no longer have any "right" to life at all. There is nothing in morality or goodness that prevents God from choosing to use human instruments in order to remove someone's life. So, as long as the Israelites were acting on God's direct orders, they were not violating the natural law at all, when we reflect on the foundations of that law.

Those quotes are widely available to anyone who has undertaken even a superficial reading of the matter, but it is good to get them on record because the consequentialist likes to hide in the weeds of false narratives, official histories and distorted facts.

You got the superficial part right, anyway. The rest is much less so. You weaken your case by trying to argue that the consequentialist case for the atomic bombings is poor. It's not. It's very, very strong, and is not seriously undermined by the quotations Mr. Culbreath reproduced. Better for us to uncompromisingly declare the truth that it is simply evil to incincerate cities full of people, and that it is not permissible to do evil that good might result. Leave the discussion of consequences and alternatives aside. They're not relevant.

For what is worth, and this probably piling on, I believe Robert Nisbet's case that Truman was anxious to use the bomb to make a statement to the wider world, in particular the Soviet Union, is true.

That's Alperovitz's case. It's speculative at best, and unnecessary to explain the use of the atomic bombs.

...we usually think of moral principles being grounded somewhat more firmly into God's nature and Divine goodness, which He cannot contradict.

Another option for justifying the Israelite genocide of Canaanites is this: while no human has the right to take another's innocent life at his own choice, God DOES that have right. All of our lives belong to God, and are granted to us only so long as God chooses to continue to will our existence. As soon as He ceases to will that, we no longer have any "right" to life at all. There is nothing in morality or goodness that prevents God from choosing to use human instruments in order to remove someone's life. So, as long as the Israelites were acting on God's direct orders, they were not violating the natural law at all, when we reflect on the foundations of that law.

That's exactly what I think. I just didn't see a need to explain my earlier statement by making it explicit. But you're probably right to sense that I should have.

Leave the discussion of consequences and alternatives aside. They're not relevant

Only if you think the historical record is unimportant and irrelevant. The mind-set that led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be explored and exposed so it can be repelled when it resurfaces in contemporary circumstances and to help slay the conceit that our wars have been fought for, and conducted by, the noblest motives and means possible. Truman is an icon and that alone should cause great concern.

I think Tony hit the conumdrum (sp?) on the head and then tried to create an escape hatch for God. The idea that God can set aside his Moral law as he pleases is like saying God can create a stone too heavy for him to lift; that he can make one plus one equal three.

Also there is a great deal regarding morality and goodness that prevents God from using humans to destroy human life indiscriminately.

Mike, I looked over your essay you linked to and can't find anything in it that addresses the matter of natural history as it is known to us. Nor can I find anything that explains how humans "fell", and brought death into Creation.

At what point do hominids become humans, for example? Three million years ago or one or not so long ago?

Since death has existed with the first organisms created on this planet, how is it that Man is responsible?

I don't know of any Christian scientists who believe in ID who think that there is a point of origin for original sin in the story of Man. Rather, if we are alienated from God, is is more a function of the consciousness which has developed in our brain/mind, and which may achieve greater perception with the help of God. It is more accurate to say that we are ignorant of God than that we are alienated by a fall and subsequent inheritance.

There are statements in the Bible that would deny that, and there are probably formulations in theology that would insist God is too great for us to know what he knows.

But the Bible and theology is making an assumption about knowledge and human consciousness that depends on omniscience. Who's then? It's insisting on a limitation of human consciousness that is merely assertion without demonstration.

Yet, we know human consciousness if processive, progressive, flexible, and expandable. I am not the same person/mind I was at birth or even twenty years ago.

We also know that animal evolution appears destined to create ever greater self-consciousness in creatures just as it creates more complex organisms. We see a process of gracile beings in progression.

Do I believe in the God proclaimed by the Church? If that is one God who is three persons who continues to inspire, save, and reveal himself to human beings, then yes, I believe in that same God. But if the Church is promoting fantasies about God and Man rather than truth, it's not really the Church, is it? Because the Church must be bound to Truth above all.

There are statements in the Bible that would deny that, and there are probably formulations in theology that would insist God is too great for us to know what he knows.

But the Bible and theology is making an assumption about knowledge and human consciousness that depends on omniscience. Who's then? It's insisting on a limitation of human consciousness that is merely assertion without demonstration.

Are you arguing that the finite can actually comprehend and even contain the Infinite?

I take it back: your intelligence is deplorably abysmal -- no ifs about that!

Brendon I am a Catholic too. It was stupid of me to comment on this but I am going to continue. In the end the atomic weapons were used because they were available, the national technical means existed and that generated its own dynamic. After a long war perhaps unprecendented in its fury and inhumanity, the mass of peoples on all sides simply wanted it to end. Even the victorious British had voted Churchill out in July 1945. Truman weighed matters and took the short road home especially in view of the increasingly strident Soviet claims over Korea and Japan after Stalin turned his attention back to the Far East. If I were at the receiving end of one of these bombs I would pray that it takes me and my whole family immediately. I do not mean to belittle the immense suffering of the peoples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The tableau of the dead (if not already vapourised) and dying recalls all the horrible incendiary images from Pompeii to Dresden.

The current generation has allowed so many terrible problems to flourish. Abortion, divorce on demand, single mothers, urban decay and crime, endless war, a generation either ignorant or ashamed of their religious and cultural identity. I would think we would do better learning from our previous generations than second guessing their actions.

Either way, we will go out—unless we recover a sense of "the laws of nature and of nature's God" that is increasingly forbidden open expression in our public life.

Why should we believe that "the laws of nature and of nature's God" were viewed as anti-consequentialist? Jefferson, for example, weighed self-preservation--as consequentialist as you get--against strict fidelity to the law and even morality (e.g., slavery). Indeed, much of modern natural law was specifically designed to allow prudence to break free from the straight-jacket of Thomistic natural law. And I don't think that modern morality is overwhelmingly consequentialist either. E.g., the (deontological) civil liberties absolutists seem to think that the Constitution is a "suicide pact."

Aris, baby, you should know there's no such thing as an Actual Infinite. Now, would you care to define infinite in terms of God's nature? Otherwise, your infinite is a meaningless word. God is infinite how? And if so, then that's something we are knowing, is it not?

I share your opinion and feelings about WW2. As for the rest, one site or another is really about time wasting, isn't it?

I would much prefer it if I had a life, as they say, and I do keep hoping to engage in a serious discussion of the many no longer supportable claims that have become attached to Christianity over time, but I don't think that's going to happen.

I like the connection here. For some time, I've viewed nuclear technology as the ultimate exertion of the natural human reality, the ability to uncreate a substance to give man power. It points up what is essentially the human condition in the absence of God. We have no ability to create, only to "creatively destroy." Undirected by reason and the proper telos of man, we can only destroy everything until we ourselves are exhausted, and this is Hell, of course. Fr. Georges Florovsky's essay which is linked below makes a point that I think you will find complementary:http://jbburnett.com/resources/florovsky/3/florovsky_3-4-darkness.pdf

Thinking about human (and angel) nature in that way certainly makes the error in deriving "ought" from "is" pretty obvious.

Your theology, or perhaps I should say your theological agenda, is curious.

The idea that God can set aside his Moral law as he pleases is like saying God can create a stone too heavy for him to lift; that he can make one plus one equal three. Also there is a great deal regarding morality and goodness that prevents God from using humans to destroy human life indiscriminately.

You're assuming that the distinction Tony and I invoked is irrelevant. Just as God cannot usually set aside the laws of nature without destroying the order of nature, God cannot usually set aside the natural moral law without destroying the moral law. But he can set aside the laws of nature on occasion without destroying the natural order, and the same goes for the natural moral law. And even when God sets the latter aside, what he's setting aside is a law that applies to us, not to him. It is not up to us to decide when innocent life is to be sacrificed; we do not have such sovereignty over life, which is why we are given the Fifth Commandment. But God does have such sovereignty. Hence, if and when he orders people to take innocent life, as distinct from doing it himself, he is suspending a law that applies to us rather than to him. There is no conceptual incoherence in that. You just find it morally objectionable. I submit that's because you have a partially mistaken idea of what a moral norm is.

Mike, I looked over your essay you linked to and can't find anything in it that addresses the matter of natural history as it is known to us. Nor can I find anything that explains how humans "fell", and brought death into Creation. At what point do hominids become humans, for example? Three million years ago or one or not so long ago? Since death has existed with the first organisms created on this planet, how is it that Man is responsible?

Before I rebut the first sentence in that, note that what you seem to expect me to have done in a combox is answer questions that entire libraries have been written about for over two millennia. All I can do here is give my answers, not my arguments.

I addressed "the matter of natural history" as follows:

Having read enough about evolution over the years to have an informed layman's opinion—most recently, I have benefited from Francis Collins' The Language of God (2006)—it has always seemed to me that said effects, as a syndrome, are just what one would expect if humans had never been elevated by grace in the first place, but instead had been left with what evolution had bequeathed. Animals get suffer, get sick, and die. For good and ill, they largely governed by instinct. Monogamy is preferred only by a minority; males often fight over territory and females; predators eat prey, who in turn prey on others; and so on. Over time, only the relatively strong and clever survive; the weak and the dull die out. Such is "nature red in tooth and claw." It's "a jungle out there," even when the jungle is asphalt. Despite our special qualities, is there any reason short of divine revelation to believe that we should be, could be, or ever were exempt from all that? Dr. Collins, who once headed the Human Genome Project, reminds us that the difference between our DNA and that of chimpanzees is less than 2%. If we're all that different, it's not because we're all that different animals. And so our evolutionary heritage is, simultaneously, the "base level" from which God elevated our progenitors, and the ambit within which our freedom is circumscribed by original sin as deprivation. Our race as a whole has never got much beyond that because our progenitors, who had indeed been elevated beyond it by grace alone, sunk back into it by their choice to grab at divinity rather than receive it in humility and obedience. They could do that because, though ideally equipped to develop real virtue freely, under divine guidance, they had barely begun the process. And of course it is only the Redemption, promised obliquely by God as recorded in Genesis 3:15, that enables us to do it once anew.

And so, my take on natural history is that humans are what they are now in large part because our ancestors chose to grab at divinity instead of receiving it as a gift. We were meant to be elevated beyond our evolutionary heritage but instead sunk back into it. That "explains how humans fell, and brought death into Creation." We didn't introduce death as though it hadn't characterized nature all along; rather, we re-introduced it for ourselves when we had been elevated beyond it by grace.

To your question: "At what point do hominids become humans, for example? Three million years ago or one or not so long ago?", not even scientists have the answer. But theology has a kind of answer. Although there's no scientific reason to believe that homo sapiens has a unitary genetic origin in a single couple, there is every theological reason to believe that the "human race" God has redeemed began with the first couple whom he elevated by grace to fellowship with himself. As I said, I don't personally believe they were literally named "Adam" and "Eve" and lived several thousand years ago in a specially created garden in Mesopotamia, though that is of course possible. I recommend your reading Ratzinger's In the Beginning, which is back in print with Ignatius Press.

I don't know of any Christian scientists who believe in ID who think that there is a point of origin for original sin in the story of Man. Rather, if we are alienated from God, is is more a function of the consciousness which has developed in our brain/mind, and which may achieve greater perception with the help of God. It is more accurate to say that we are ignorant of God than that we are alienated by a fall and subsequent inheritance.

Well, I don't believe ID as a scientific theory because I don't think it is realistically testable. But I do believe that God designed the laws of nature, and that those in turn account for the evolution of the human body. And given what I've already said in the paragraphs above, there is no scientific or theological reason to deny that the first sin was committed by the first couple to be elevated beyond nature, having been created with a spiritual soul that nature could never have produced of itself.

Everything I've said, BTW, can be found in writings by the current and the previous pope.

For some time, I've viewed nuclear technology as the ultimate exertion of the natural human reality, the ability to uncreate a substance to give man power. It points up what is essentially the human condition in the absence of God. We have no ability to create, only to "creatively destroy." Undirected by reason and the proper telos of man, we can only destroy everything until we ourselves are exhausted, and this is Hell, of course.

That one passed me by a bit too quickly. Are you putting Madame Curie's discovery and analysis of radiologic substances, and nuclear medicine, in the category of "man creatively destroying" and therefore Hell? I think that you probably mean nuclear weapons, not nuclear technology.

Taking that as a given, I am still not sure what your point is: Chemical weapons like TNT use chemical reactive processes - combustion - that occur very quickly indeed, to reduce one substance to another chemically, and set up a resulting gas expansion that is explosive in force and thus destructive to nearby things. We use these explosive forces for good (say, mining and preparatory for building) and for other things that are morally good even though they cause humans harm (such as stopping an invading army bent on imperial conquering).

Nuclear weapons use a technique that is vastly faster, and thus the explosion is vastly more powerful, but other than that there is no definitive moral difference. In both chemical and nuclear weapons, one substance changes into another substance - there is no annihilation of being going on. In both the use to which the explosion is put determines the act and thus its morality. (And no, I am not advocating consequential "use" here, just the ordinary kind of morality that expresses an act in terms of its nature, object, circumstances, and end). If a nuclear missile were to be shot into space and exploded in order to break up an incoming asteroid, this would surely be a moral act. But it is still a nuclear bomb. It is possible to use chemical weapons to indiscriminately destroy cities, such as Coventry, Dresden, and Tokyo. This fact does not undermine the morality of chemical technology, or even of weapons founded on chemical changes.

A nuclear bomb no more annihilates being than does your eating an apple. The digestive reactions eradicate the substance of apple but only by turning its matter into part of you. A nuclear bomb changes U-235 into various other substances, and that change causes all sorts of other chemical changes around it - but neither digestion nor chemical explosion nor nuclear explosion annihilates being. Even a fusion bomb only changes stuff from hydrogen into helium + energy.

Okay I see the distinction you're making that God's moral laws apply to us and not to him. I find that distinction absurd, since it's like saying logic applies to us and not to God, but that's your take. I get it.

I did read that section of yours you cite again on evolution, but again, as natural history, there isn't a bit of reality in it as you insist that somehow, somewhere, at some time humans made a grab at divinity and re-introduced death into their lives because they had been elevated by grace previously.

There is such convoluted straining in this and swallowing of camels that it defies credulity. You seem like a smart guy. You probably are, but I know from my own experience that the desire of a devout and faithful man to try and squeeze reality into the Procrustean beds of Christian (or Catholic) doctrine end up doing a great disservice to reason and, eventually, faith.

The Church's notion of The Fall simply can't bear the kind of scrutiny that rational inquiry must make of it. But why should we expect an understanding of reality, nature and God from nearly three thousands years ago to apply exactly to natural history today. This is a Creationism about man's state that simply doesn't pass the smell test anymore.

Think about it. In order to accommodate present science, you've already moved Adam and Eve out of the garden into the Savannah, made them anonymous, but still immortal creatures who somehow throw it all away, still defy God, but we don't know how. This is really murky theology compared to the beauty and simplicity of Genesis.

This is about the tangled webs we weave when we are compelled to defend doctrine against our better judgment because we are zealous for all our faith claims to be perfect and true. But an absolute love of God does not depend on how well we maintain doctrine, it only depends on knowing and loving God and accepting the guidance of the Holy Spirit even if it leads to conflict with doctrines that no longer are very important.

God simplifies everything. Man proposes, God disposes, as they say. I'm all for disposal of the unnecessary, the unessential, and the irrelevant.

Mark, I would have thought that without the Fall, grace is also one of those unnecessary, the unessential, and the irrelevant elements we can dispose of. And without the Fall and grace, there is nothing left of any concrete revelation of God to man.

You say that the only thing necessary is knowing and loving God and accepting the guidance of the Holy Spirit . Without revelation, we would have no knowledge of the Holy Spirit. The same revelation that tells us of the Spirit is the one that tells us of the Fall and the need for grace. You can't get one without the other.

Okay I see the distinction you're making that God's moral laws apply to us and not to him. I find that distinction absurd, since it's like saying logic applies to us and not to God, but that's your take.

That criticism would makes sense only on the premise that the body of moral law is just like that of the laws of logic. Thus, just as the latter prescribe norms for any process of reasoning whatsoever, the former prescribe norms of action for any rational agent whatsoever. That premise would in turn make sense if the only rational agents were us, or beings of roughly the same level of capacity as ours. But of course, if there is a God, that is simply not the case. There must of course be some sort of analogy between what "righteousness" means in our case and what it means in God's, else it would make no sense to ascribe, e.g., wisdom or justice or love to God. But there cannot be a match, and they cannot even be of the same order, else God would be the same kind of rational agent as us, which he isn't. Hence, until you can show why we should nevertheless believe that the Fifth Commandment applies to God as much as to us, your criticism has no traction.

I did read that section of yours you cite again on evolution, but again, as natural history, there isn't a bit of reality in it as you insist that somehow, somewhere, at some time humans made a grab at divinity and re-introduced death into their lives because they had been elevated by grace previously. There is such convoluted straining in this and swallowing of camels that it defies credulity...The Church's notion of The Fall simply can't bear the kind of scrutiny that rational inquiry must make of it.

I have reaffirmed doctrines taught by traditional Christianity from the beginning: that man's nature cannot be fully accounted for by physical factors, that man's destiny is beyond nature, that the first couple to be thus elevated didn't abide by the conditions of that destiny, and that their failure caused their descendants to revert to "nature red in tooth and claw." Cutting through the rhetoric, all you're saying there is that you don't find that account credible. But you give no argument showing, or even purporting to show, why it isn't credible. To insist that it is incompatible with "rational inquiry" is empty unless you can show philosophically, without begging the question, what the boundaries of rational inquiry are. You have not even attempted to do that.

In order to accommodate present science, you've already moved Adam and Eve out of the garden into the Savannah, made them anonymous, but still immortal creatures who somehow throw it all away, still defy God, but we don't know how. This is really murky theology compared to the beauty and simplicity of Genesis.

There are two accounts of creation in Genesis: that in the first and that in the second chapter. Taken literally, they cannot both be true, for they are not entirely compatible with each other. That alone shows that, in the early chapters of Genesis, we're dealing not with what we call science, but with theology presented in the form of myth. As Ratzinger showed in the book I cited, that is also the case for Genesis 3, the account of the Fall. In keeping with that, I have separated the literal, theological kernel from the mythic husk. That kernel cannot be established as scientific truth because it is divine revelation not science. You have offered no argument to show why that is unacceptable; you have merely stated your aesthetic preference for the myth.

But an absolute love of God does not depend on how well we maintain doctrine, it only depends on knowing and loving God and accepting the guidance of the Holy Spirit even if it leads to conflict with doctrines that no longer are very important.

As Tony implied, the doctrines of the Fall and original sin remain very important because they indicate what it is that Jesus Christ, by his sacrificial death, redeemed us from. You are rejecting that indication. But again, you have given no argument showing why we should retain the doctrines you like while rejecting the ones you dislike. Both sets of doctrines are taught with equal authority by the Church.

I think you're a wonderful man, and I find your heart and mind both intelligent, compassionate, reasonable, and sincere.

I am not arguing against revelation. I love revelation for it has surely saved me from tragedy and the hell of my own making. I am arguing, instead, that revelation does not begin or end with the Church as we generally accord it. I am also arguing that God and revelation is much simpler than what we have done with it over the ages. But I would never discount the value of the Church as the best vehicle or raft to carry us through the many great confusions that occur when truth is revealed to us.

Religion gives us a necessary discipline and structure to develop our life of prayer and understanding as we work out our salvation in fear and trembling.

But part of my contention is the seeming strangeness that a good deal of what we need at any given time is provisional. It's a bit like AA, working the program, learning to practice virtue, being healed in Christ, seeking to understand, and subordinating our will to that of a master, both through the Church, the Bible, and through the Holy Spirit.

But once our wild and wounded hearts have been tamed by Christ, we are still left with our reason and wisdom that wants to grasp the truth in its purity and simplicity.

Then we may run into difficulties of certain doctrines not quite adding up or making sense.

For example, if we are reductive about revelation and the Bible, we might contend that the whole of the Old Testament is really the contention that Man is not God and ought to behave accordingly. And two, that the most important part of Jesus' life was his resurrection. Thus we learn that we are not gods and two, death is not death.

The very greatest human concern of all is terror that is having being that must die and know not what is to come. Jesus shows us and reveals himself to us time and again that death is not annihilation and we shall live on.
Knowing that Jesus was murdered may help to make us humble but knowing the lesson that we are not gods ought to help us adjust to the fact that we are immortal and accountable to One much greater.

Mike L.,

You've hit upon a major difficulty the Church has in jettisoning the notion of an actual physical or metaphysical Fall. It ruins the doctrine of Atonement. (Not entirely, but substantially for current theology.)

It will sound much colder than I intend to what follows, but simply speaking, the manner of Jesus' death is meaningless. So what how he dies? Many people have had much worse deaths? It is his resurrection that matters because only his resurrection proves to us that death is not death for humans (if Jesus was a real man).

Who cares how he died? Who cares how he was born? Who cares what his mother or father were? None of that matters if he isn't alive today.

Thus, if his resurrection is the single most important fact about him, all the rest is persiflage or nonsense, or made up, or truthfully reported, or mythical, or whatever.

If you've met the risen man/God, it doesn't really matter if he really said this or that or was misremembered or invented or anything. What matters is that He lives and He/God is available to guide you. The Church can help you in that as a repository of wisdom and experience and rites, but it can also hurt you for being irrational, dogmatic, hidebound, pietistic, clerical, and infantile.

If you have met God and know he lives and will personally guide you if you are patient, persevering, trusting, yet skeptical, too, about unprovable things and a little wise to both human folly, delusion, and your own ability to fool yourself. (And as Feynman once said, you're the easiest person to fool of all.)

No, my answer is that it's best to know God, and the best way to know him is through prayer (as you're instructed to do ceaselessly), and if yu aren't putting in the prayer hours, seeking contemplation of the One, the All, and accepting guidance from the three persons, then its all mostly going through the motions of faith.

You can only know yourself as well as you know God. It's a marvelous little parallel that makes all the sense in the world.

Mike, I was going to mention the first account in Genesis, but didn't want to lengthen the response.

As to accounting for how Man didn't defy God, the record of natural history that I invoke is the demonstration. I have much to relate about how what you may consider unique to man is not unique at all, not in kind but of degree, and that degree is very slight. I have many examples from nature about lower animals that demonstrate that the sense of morality, justice, is built into natural consciousness and being. That our instincts regarding love, compassion, nurturing, cooperation, teaching, and so on are all built into nature and find more obvious parallel in higher mammals but "the force that through the green fuse drives" is common to all living things.

God did not set out a set one kind of being for animals and another for humans. He set out a path for the development of ever higher degrees of consciousness.

A mother's love for her infant is no different than a dog's for her litter. It is the exact same impulse, but our mother is aware of the impulse even while she is driven by it.

Love is not unique to humans. Reason is not unique. Emotion is not unique. Creativity is not unique. Nor is humor, anger, resentment, and many other things.

God sets in motion a destiny of consciousness so that his creatures may become aware to the point of joining Him, becoming one and being saved from selfishness, ignorance, and all the accidents that damage us.

Jesus, his resurrection and that revelation is essential to that. I don't see how that diminishes faith or good religion.

And without death, God can't build a progression of organisms that culminate in creatures who become followers of him, and become like him (in some respect).

Man did not bring death into the world. The proof is obvious in natural history. And at no time were there creatures who arose through nature and were immortal and threw it away through folly. Doctrine may demand that be so, but nature and reason insist that you have to prove such an assertion. WE know there has always been death with living things. Show us where there was a time and place where that wasn't so for one bright and shining moment? Well, of course, you can't.

But I can show you the miracle, the absurdity of a man recovering from death and getting up alive. How? Through experience. People, millions of them, who are sincere about wanting to know the truth about God, have had it revealed to them directly and it results in a change of life and being.

Mike, I'm talking reality and experience, and you're a bit to the side talking abstractions, analogies, and metaphors about the real.

An awful article because it takes as a fact that the it was the bomb that ended the war against Japan and that its use saved hundreds and thousands of Allied lives. The invasion of Japan was planned for November 1945. This needs to be highlighted. The Trinity test was conducted on 16 July. The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August, the second bomb against Nagasaki on 9 August. The Emperor announces surrender on 15 August. The time frame here is seductive as it assumes a progession - from test- to bomb- to surrender in less than a month. Focusing on the military option - the invasion of Japan to end the war, avoids the diplomatic option which every senior policy maker was aware of which was - under terms and conditions to be decided upon, the Emperor would not be touched. Furthermore, Truman, Stimson, and Byrnes all knew that when the Soviet Union entered the war, the Japanese would realize that they were in a hopeless situation. Stalin had agreed to enter the war against Japan. He entered it earlier than originally planned attacking on 8 August.

Why the rush to use the only two bombs the U.S.? (Of course there would be other bombs manufactured.) Was it because of projected invasion casualty figures? Or was it the need to have an announced "unconditional surrender" which was in fact conditional since the Emperor was retained on the throne.

If one is going to engage in conflict analysis - it is imperative to do accurate mapping. The obscene math of calculating projected and inflated U.S. casualty figures against the victims of two atomic bombings justifies unrestricted and mass violence.

I find that some of the more strident assertions made about the supposed mass adoption of consequentialism seem to use an expansive understanding of it. I've been down this road before. Introduce any facts or context and it's "you're saying that this justifies that! . . . you're a consequentialist!!!" Debates that start out this way tend to signal less that what will follow it less an argument than name calling. Anyone who disagrees is tarred with being a consequentialist. Well, what is the proper role of consequences (outcomes) in moral decisions for a virtue ethicist? None? No. Yet one could be forgiven for thinking so by strident assertions of this type.

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